Thoughts on 1440p Monitor?

I've been rocking a 24 inch 1080p screen from Asus for 2 years now. It looks good and works well for me. But there's always something better, and as such I'm thinking of pushing my current 1080p screen to my secondary screen (currently a 20" 900p display), and replacing it with a 1440p screen. I've got a couple questions.

1. How much will my performance suffer making this jump? I don't need maxed settings and 60FPS all the time, but I don't want to chop my framerate in half for a higher resolution either. See specs below for reference. Currently my most demanding game that I play is GTA V which I can run almost maxed out at 45-60+ FPS. I don't buy the latest games on a regular basis and most of the time don't even push my current hardware to the limits.

2. If I needed to run at 1080p on a 1440p display for performance reasons, does the upscaled picture look that bad? Images of course will not look as good when upscaled, but is it going to ruin it entirely? If needed, I could just toss the game on my 1080p screen to help this, but it would make having the 1440p display seemingly pointless.

3. What size should I be looking at? I remember thinking my 20" monitor that I originally used at 1600x900 was all I'd ever want or need, but when I jumped to a 24" display at 1080p, it was a whole new world for me. I don't mind having mismatched displays, but I don't want to sink money into a huge display either, but a bigger screen is always nice.

4. Is 1440p going to get "skipped" in the progression of resolutions? Obviously this is hard to answer, but I don't know how fast the adoption of 4K will be and don't want to spend money on a monitor if it's quickly replaced.

5. Anything else I should know about monitors? I don't know much really other than resolution and refresh rate. I don't have the money or horsepower to necessitate a 144Hz display. Same goes for 4K. Brand suggestions? I've tended to gravitate towards Asus recently with that monitor and this laptop I'm on now.


I imagine I'll be looking at an upgrade to my CPU and GPU in the next year or two, so that's something to also think about.

1. From the quick look that I did into 7970 performance, but you may need to drop the details for games that are more demanding. I would think that in most games you would probably take off AA and AF and maybe some of the details down from Ultra to High.

2. I would run at native res if at all possible. Scaling looks way worse to me than keeping the details high.

3. 27" and up. Games won't matter so much but I find that smaller than 27" is a bit hard to read smaller text.

4. I don't think so. Most people aren't going to spend the money to jump to 4K. QHD is a good balance for the price.

5. This is my favorite so far, but it is not the fastest panel for gaming. Others might have a better idea on what is good for it.

http://www.amazon.com/Dell-UltraSha...=UTF8&qid=1437415095&sr=8-5&keywords=qhd+dell

I was hoping Geoff would pop-in since I know he runs 1440p on a 7970. It's a respectable card still today even, but I worry how much I'd have to turn down stuff. One of my absolute biggest gripes is jaggies though, something that a high resolution would help with. I'll need to do some real research on it when I get back to somewhere with stable internet.

Is text really going to be that tiny on say a 25 inch screen? I know most things let you crank up the font size as needed, but they seem finnicky. At least in W7.

I expected as much about playing at a native resolution.

Thanks Salvage! Anybody else have thoughts?

I would stay away from Windows scaling like the plague. Seems to work fine in some applications and completely breaks the UI in others. I work on a u2713hm all day and I find that text lower than size 10 is a bit hard to read after a few minutes. You might have better eyesight than I do, so that might not be a problem. Just an observation from my time on one.

Jaggies are less of a problem with QHD displays. I generally play games with it off unless I am hitting 80/90fps and just feel like setting the graphics to max. I don't really see much of a difference. Geoff might be able to give you a better idea on his experience.

Update: Purchased a 25" 1440p Acer. 7970 can still push GTA V at highish settings with a solid FPS. I prefer the higher settings and frames though and 1080p to 1440p upscaling looks like native 1080p to me honestly. Haven't tested anything else, but I should be able to flex the resolution on some older games.